Chips at the Ready

[shipitfish]

I read something in another blog that I had been meaning to mention here as a bit of advice for newer players. It's a simple tidbit of live play help that I've actually never seen mentioned elsewhere. I was therefore excited to see it mentioned in Steve's Poker Notes, an online journal of a semi-pro player in Texas. (LJ users will want this syndicated feed.)

One of the toughest parts about playing live if you are new — either because you are a new player altogether, or because your previous experience has been online — is tracking the pot size. I began with limit HE, which is a nice starter course. For limit games, you only need to count how many small bets are in the pot, then divide in half after the flop action, then start counting big bets from there. You are also always just adding one to a number already in your head, so pot-counting can become an automatic background task of your brain with practice.

NL games are more difficult, because you usually need to keep track in dollar amounts, or at least number of chips (if, generally, people have the same color of chips). To aid in counting, about six months ago, I started getting into a defined habit right after the preflop action ends. As the action closes on the preflop round, I pull aside from my stack the amount that is in the pot. Steve recently posted that he does the same thing.

This movement has a number of advantages. First, you have a reference for the pot size as the flop action starts, in case you lose count. Second, if you feel that making a quick bet is the image and feeling you want to get across, you can quickly make both full pot-sized and half-pot (by cutting the stack in half) bets without any counting.

My River Street colleagues probably remember me as one of “those” players who took forever to act. The truth that I never told anyone but nick_marden at the time was that I spent half that time putting the action back together and figuring out how much was in the pot. I have a good memory for action in a poker game, and can often reconstruct the pot size at any moment, but it wastes time and distracts from thinking about what is actually going on. It's better to have a reference handy so you don't need to recount.

I have found this little organizational trick to work best on the flop. Recently, at the Wynn, I experimented with doing it on the turn and river in very deep stacked games. I found there was a certain amount of fumbling required to get the (usually now large) pot size set aside before the turn came out, all while trying to watch my opponents reaction to the turn card. So, I gave up continuing that experiment for a while. Since then, I've been thinking that maybe pulling two times the pot size aside preflop might be an aid in speeding along this process and make it possible to have a similar “reference stack” for the turn as well. (Note: in shorter stacked (100 big blind buy-in) games, it's unlikely there will be enough chips behind as the turn comes for the exact amounts to matter past that point. Typically in such games, everyone only has a pot size bet left if there has been significant action on the flop.)

Another edge this process gives you is that you never actually have to glance at your chips during the flop betting round. Not even to count your own bet, raise or call. This allows you to watch your opponents instead, and makes sure you don't have the classic Caro “chip glancing” tell when you hit the flop. You just train yourself: I have no reason to look at my chips during the flop round, so I won't no matter what.

Finally, if you are a nervous chip handler — meaning, you always want to play with chips — this gives you a working stack to play with that actually has some meaning. Oh, do note that if you do have that chip riffling nervous habit, be sure you don't stop or riffle more vigorously based on what's going on in the hand. I used to have a tell whereby I fumbled more with chip riffling if I was worried my opponent was about to do what I didn't want him to do (which allowed someone to fake a call, see I reacted poorly, and then go ahead make the call). Now I don't play with chips at all once I've acted on a particular betting round for this reason.

Anyway, it was good to see, with Steve's post, that this method of counting the pot from your stack isn't just a silly personal habit. Looks like it might be a useful piece of advice to new players.

Comments

neat trick

[arctic-giraffe.livejournal.com]

That's a very useful tip, thanks for sharing. I play mostly online, and have found that during my limited live sessions I do have trouble remembering exactly how much is in the pot on the flop, and miss out on quick betting opportunities because of it. I'll give it a try next time.

[swolfe.livejournal.com]

turn and river bets, i basically just multiply the bet on the previous street by the number of callers + 1. sometimes more or less depending on the board/stack sizes, but that's my base number.

[swolfe.livejournal.com]

oh, and if it gets to the turn and river, i pretty much just verbalize my bet and put out the chips afterwards. by then the pot size is pretty easy to remember since there's always fewer players. it's really only preflop that you need to actively keep up with all the limpers and whatnot.

[shipitfish.livejournal.com]

Well, in most games that's true, although I play in a game here in NYC where we've typically got four or five people seeing a turn. It plays like limit HE some nights in that regard, but keeping the pot size clear on the turn can be a challenge because so many people are coming in. I also don't like to say amounts out loud, because I feel it is a great place to put across tells and I don't actually want my opponents to think I'm spending much time calculating what number to bet; I want them to believe my bet sizes have as little relation as possible to the size of the pot.